Introduction  

From the age of fifty I found my life speeding up like a Bullet Train on corroded tracks. I flashed through the stations of Grey Hair Bend, Failing Eyesight Falls, Deaf Town, Denture Downs, Celibate City, Replacement Retreat, Varicose Vale, and almost came off the rails at Grumpy Hollow before reaching Senility Square, on the outskirts of Depression Valley.  

Not a trip for the faint hearted. 

Whoever says ‘Age is all in the mind’ hasn’t checked the mirror lately, or else they need an urgent appointment with their Obstetrician – or do I mean Optician? (I get so confused lately. I made an appointment at the Neurologist and finished up at the Urologist. Couldn’t work out why he was checking out my dick!) 

I write short novels because those who read them might not last to the final chapter of a longer book. 

Don’t buy green mangoes, don’t start watching television mini-series, don’t even attempt to sit through Lord of the Rings, and never make appointments more than a week in advance, is my motto. 

If you laugh at this book, make sure you don’t laugh too loudly or too long. If you do the kids may pack you off to the nearest, or maybe the furthest, Funny Farm.

Chapter 1

Beauty and stupidity are in the eye of the beholder

o give you a picture of the author as you plough your way  through the following chapters of random thoughts, I would like to describe myself as tall, slim, olive skinned, with good muscle definition, glossy dark, wavy hair with a hint of silver ‘wisdom strands’, sparkling blue eyes with a naughty glint, a distinctive, classical profile and an engaging smile that hints of sexual playfulness.  

I would very much like to describe myself as such but that would be a trifle exaggerated. In fact, in 1937, my mother gave birth to an eight-pound nose – with a sinus condition – and the rest of me grew on later. This was not a propitious start.  

I do have olive skin and my muscles are well defined – by wrinkles and sagging skin. My wife declares I have always had the body of David, but I have since discovered she was not referring to Michelangelo’s masterpiece, but to David Willhelmstein from number 27, who is eighty-two and suffering from some mysterious wasting disease. My hair is completely faded silver and my blue eyes no longer sparkle, except when I bend over and stand up too quickly, but they are, patriotically, red, white and blue, and the sexual playfulness outplayed itself long ago. What happened to the previous exuberant, fun-filled youth, I have no idea. 

It was like I had dozed off to sleep somewhere in 1980 and suddenly surfaced in 2008. It was sort of an epiphany, really. I suddenly realised that, in fact, I was still living in the 70s; with the same behaviour, reasoning, ethics, moral standards and, I’m fairly certain, some of the same wardrobe. Mind you, I suspect in the seventies I was still living in the fifties. I just don’t seem to be able to catch up. Forget the X and Y generations; I have now entered the Zzzzzzz Generation. 

I was sitting at home watching ABC television with my wife, who is disabled down the left side from a stroke eight years ago. This suspiciously occurred after a neck operation and not being given any blood-thinning drug to counteract clotting. 

She hates euphemisms and especially the word ‘disabled’. ‘I’m not disabled, I’m fuckin’ crippled,’ she claims indignantly. But she says it beautifully. She used to be a speech teacher in bygone years, with a wonderful mercurial voice and a marvellous laugh, which someone once described as ‘laughing in arpeggio’. Unfortunately, her voice and speech have tended to flatten out a lot since the stroke but she still says ‘Fuck’ beautifully, and probably a little more frequently.  

I have to talk to her seriously about this loathing of euphemisms. ‘Now look,’ I say, ‘you can’t have signs up everywhere saying “Fuckin’ Cripple Parking” or “Fuckin’ Cripple Toilets”. Someone’s sure to take offence.’  

She also hates the euphemism ‘indigenous’, claiming, according to the Oxford Dictionary, it means ‘born or produced naturally in a region; belonging naturally’. In which case she claims to be indigenous, certainly being produced naturally in Queensland in 1937. I have to forcibly stop her from ticking the indigenous box on Government forms.  

Anyway, I digress. A BBC programme came on entitled Grumpy Old Men, which consisted of a half a dozen men of a similar ‘mature’ age to myself, I thought, having a whinge about all sorts of subjects in today’s world that really piss them off. It turned out these Grumpy Old Men were in fact only in their mid fifties! Mere children in their prime. Unfortunately, they don’t have an Australian version of the show out yet but no doubt that will follow in due course, as, not to be original seems to be an unending pattern of television in this country.  

To the amazement of She Who Can’t Be Ignored, and even myself, I found myself shouting, very loudly and passionately, ‘YES! YES! YES!!!’ somewhat in the style of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, without the exchange of any bodily fluids. What’s happening? I wondered. Could there possibly be other men out there who think the same way as I do? I thought I was totally alone. But, apparently not.  

Why is this? I asked myself. Why do we old buggers feel compelled to whinge at seemingly everything? Probably because we’ve had years of inactivity to think about things and we’ve come to the conclusion we’re inescapably right and anybody younger is obviously wrong and we have reached the stage where cynicism has become reality.  

Now it’s true that this was an English program and in Australia the Poms have a probably undeserved reputation for whinging, and, like the Americans, they do seem to live on a different planet, but there is one thing we do have in common and that is whinging against perceived injustices. Well, I mean, just think about it. 

It’s the 18th of February in the year 2000 at 6.30pm. I’ve just finished mowing the lawn and Marie’s preparing dinner. We sit down on the terrace overlooking the park and lake, our favourite spot to enjoy a pre-dinner glass of wine, with the sun setting over the distant hills and the water reflecting like a mirror. It’s so peaceful. Marie is telling me about a friend of ours who has just been visiting her daughter in NSW and in mid sentence, without a beat of a pause, her voice suddenly changes and sounds like a record has suddenly been switched from seventy-eight RPM to forty-five, every word slowing down and elongated, low and flat.

I look at her to see if she is joking and say, ‘Sorry, what did you just say?’

Continuing in that same flat awful tone she says, ‘I said, Shirley just got back from visiting Amanda …’

‘Why are you talking like that?’ I ask.

‘Like what?’ she drones.

I suddenly notice she has slumped slightly to her left and her face has dropped slightly on that side. Christ! A stroke! She’s having a stroke! I race to the phone and dial 000. In seconds our life has changed and will never be the same again. 

Well, for a start, take our average general health. We seem to spend so much bloody time being encouraged to look after our health and beauty, what with doctors’ appointments, blood tests, eye tests, X rays, dentists, physiotherapists, and not to mention, proctologists and urologists, who like to keep their fingers in everything so to speak, and dozens of other denizens of the medical profession. I swear there are some weeks when it’s difficult to find a spare day to fit in the next medical or dental appointment. And their favourite word is always ‘degeneration’.  

Everything is degenerating. Now in our youth we took a certain pride in being called a ‘degenerate’ but in old age the word has elongated somewhat and the implications are completely different and frankly, insufferable. We’re literally falling apart or degenerating at such a pace that it won’t be long before our bodies completely collapse and crumble away into dust and extinction. If I wake up in the morning and nothing hurts, I think I died during the night.  

And yet our minds and senses are positively flooded constantly with advice from ‘experts’ at every page turn and channel switch, on how to live longer and of course happier, more beautiful, and healthier lives. Now let’s face it, very few of us, if any, look or feel beautiful after the age of, at tops forty, and it’s all downhill from there on in until sixty, and then the acceleration increases at such a pace it’s like flying into a black hole in space. And after seventy you don’t want to know about it and you can really only make future plans up until next Wednesday. I’m all for ‘pushing or looking outside the envelope’, but pushing hurts my back, and no matter how hard I push, it still remains stationary, and looking is all very well, if I can find my fucking reading glasses.  

The stores and pharmacies are stuffed with rejuvenating creams and lotions to erase lines and wrinkles, blemishes and age – oops – maturity spots. I need a lotion, cream or pill to take away the crow’s feet, wrinkles and blemishes in my brain. Diets and advice are pushed at us by gurus who have never even been to India. Steered in every direction from no carbs to high carbs, high protein to low protein, lower your cholesterol, fat-eating spreads, take vitamins, don’t take vitamins, eat this, don’t eat that, don’t drink, don’t smoke, but hey, ‘It’s really important to enjoy yourself in old age,’ the psychiatrists extol; ‘it’s good for your heart’.  

So throw down a Viagra and screw yourself to death. When ya gonna go, at least go happy. And what about that Age-Defying Makeup for women? The only age-defying makeup that works is putty or a decent coat of formaldehyde. 

It also amazes me how dentistry has changed since I was a kid. If you had a toothache in those days they ripped the fuckin’ tooth out! I often wonder, when I see pictures of skeletons, hundreds or thousands of years old that they’ve dug up, how most of them all seem to have a full set of choppers. Was that because they didn’t have dentists then? They certainly didn’t have Colgate.  

I have been through, ‘Brush your teeth in a circular motion, brush your teeth up and down, brush your teeth horizontally, use a hard brush, use a medium brush, use a soft brush. Brush gently, brush vigorously’, which I did for years, causing me to wear a trench in the enamel.  

And now, as the sun sets on the one-time glistening whities and they loosen in their sockets, I sit in the dentist’s waiting room singing the Abba hit ‘Denture Queen’ while I bid farewell to the days of chomping a tough steak and look forward to a diet of vitamised mush. 

The ambulance arrives and I’m in such a state of shock I don’t know what to do to help her. I’ve never seen anyone with a stroke before. My mind can’t accept the enormity of what is happening. The attendants are serious and efficient, lifting her onto a stretcher and giving her oxygen. I light myself a cigarette to ease my nerves and one of the attendants snaps, ‘Put that out! We’ll take her to John Flynn Emergency. You want to ride with her?’

I automatically think I will need my car to get back home again. The thought of a taxi never occurs to me. How strange. ‘No, I’ll follow in the car.’

Much later she tells me she was cold in the ambulance and she’d thought that I was sending her to hospital alone to get rid of her. She had no idea what had happened to her. I cried then. 

And of course at this stage, wouldn’t you know, Willie, my local member for fun, is no longer a ‘standing’ member. After dominating my life since I was fourteen or so, he has apparently decided to retire from the house and indeed the party. No more the night-long sessions, the sometimes-raucous behaviour, the jocular intercourse. (Or even serious, if it comes to that.) No interjections without injections. Well, at least I outlived the wrinkly old bastard.  

But those of us Withereds in a similar condition are still constantly inundated with sex; in movies, books, mind-numbing celebrity and fashion magazines, stage shows, and a never-ending plethora of awful television commercials assuring us that if we buy this or wear that we will become one of the ‘beautiful’ people and be more sexually alluring. Now I’m sorry but can you honestly show me a sexually alluring, beautiful-looking person at seventy?  

So if I can no longer get it up does it mean I can’t really wear those clothes, drive that car, use that aftershave or cologne, eat that chocolate, because it will make me too sexy, too attractive? Would that be a kind of false advertising on my part? Could I be sued for making myself so sexually alluring that I’m irresistible, and then bomb out at the point of entry, so to speak? In these days of American-inspired lawsuits, probably. 

We sit outside the hospital emergency reception and wait, each lost in our own fears. Myself, for my beautiful wife of forty years, whom I love, and our only child, Ben, for the mother who loves him so dearly. Eventually they call us in and we creep into the emergency ward and find her apparently sleeping. A lady doctor comes up to us and, in reply to our whispered questions, tells us that they’re going to admit her into the hospital and no, they can’t say the extent of the damage until further tests are made but to try to keep our hopes up because some stroke victims recover fairly quickly. She doesn’t.

And speaking of lawsuits, why is it that there always has to be someone to blame, to sue, for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? What happened to personal responsibility? If you trip over a crack in the road or fall into a trench someone has left open, don’t sue, open your fucking eyes.

I really think though that there should be a different set of laws, rules and regulations for the over sixties. I mean we were brought up in a different era with different attitudes, different standards. It’s like the western civilisations trying to understand the Orientals, or Middle Eastern civilisations, or women. We don’t THINK the same! Stupidity in laws, rules and regulations has existed in every era. It’s just as you get older you have more time to think and seethe about them and see them for the intrusive insults and manipulation they really are. Warn us of the dangers and then, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, let us make up our own bloody minds but don’t make it a law.  

Seat belts for instance; now personally I agree with wearing them; it makes sense to me. But if someone doesn’t want to wear one, let them kill themselves. And if they complain and threaten to sue, the courts could say, ‘Sorry you were warned. Next case!’  

The same could be said for smoking. Now don’t start me on that. 

On the way home I do a lot of thinking. I think about how much she means to me; the history we have shared. The way she has cared for me during the forty years of our marriage, forgoing her career for the sake of mine, supporting me and our small son when I was out of work, spoiling us, loving us unconditionally. I make a solemn commitment to look after her and care for her for as long as I am able, ‘till death us do part’, as we vowed, to give her the happiest life I can.

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